TV news cover Trump’s court hearing with wall-to-wall coverage
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Photojournalists and supporters of former US president Donald Trump outside the courthouse where he is getting arraigned, on June 13.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
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NEW YORK - It is becoming a familiar playbook.
Two months after exhaustively covering former United States president Donald Trump’s arraignment in a New York City courtroom
Three of the major broadcast networks – ABC, NBC and CBS – interrupted their usual afternoon programming to cover the news. NBC sent its evening news anchor Lester Holt to Miami, as did CBS with Ms Norah O’Donnell.
The cable news networks turned to its top news anchors. Mr Jake Tapper and Mr Anderson Cooper oversaw coverage on CNN, and Mr Bret Baier and Ms Martha MacCallum helped lead coverage on Fox News.
Like Trump’s trip to a courthouse in New York, the six major broadcast and cable news networks all used overhead shots to show Trump’s motorcade making the roughly 20-minute trip to downtown Miami, where the former president was arraigned.
The wall-to-wall coverage represented yet another day in which Trump dominated the airwaves. Many of the panellists who took part in the coverage discussed the momentous nature of the day.
“Whenever politics and law clash, there’s always a tension because they are both places where fighting takes place,” Mr John Dickerson of CBS said from a makeshift set on a balcony overlooking the courthouse in Miami.
“Politics is the fighting of the barroom, and the law is more like a boxing match – there are some rules.”
Unlike the arraignment in April, there was decidedly a lack of useful footage.
There were no shots of Trump entering the courthouse – his motorcade entered a garage – nor were there any images inside the federal building. The networks relied instead on images of demonstrators outside the courthouse.
Fox News broadcast live images of a person the network’s anchors described as Ms Melania Trump, the former first lady – though within a few minutes the network said it was, in fact, not her.
“A day like this, with so many comings and goings, it’s easy from a distance to mistake two people,” said Mr John Roberts, the Fox anchor, who clarified it was actually Ms Margo Martin, a Trump aide.
Earlier in the day, Fox News carried a news conference outside the Miami courthouse by Mr Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential candidate, in which he asked other candidates to commit to pardoning Trump.
Five hours later, Mr Ramaswamy sat for a live Fox News interview with Ms MacCallum, this time in studio in New York.
“You’re moving around quickly today,” she observed, before he denounced a “politicised indictment”.
All day long, MSNBC seemed to be looking ahead, displaying a graphic in the lower-right corner of its screen, featuring an image of Ms Rachel Maddow, Ms Nicolle Wallace and Ms Joy Reid, billing a 8pm prime-time “post-arraignment special”.
The news about Trump has been good for MSNBC’s ratings.
Last week, the network finished No. 1 among the cable news networks in total viewers in prime-time for the full calendar week – the first time it had achieved that in more than two years.
The network averaged 1.52 million viewers, narrowly besting Fox News’ 1.51 million viewers and overwhelming CNN’s average of 677,000 viewers.
It was also MSNBC’s highest viewership during weekday prime-time hours since Trump’s April arraignment. NYTIMES
